I believe that together the Armenian and Turkish youths can end hate by working together. I try to create and develop an awareness in the Turkish youth, especially my articles on the Armenian Genocide and also about other genocides committed by our ancestors Turks as genocide on the Assyrians, Nestorians, the Chaldeans and Pontic Greeks, so that such crimes are never committed.

I try to change the false perception in Turkey on Armenians and Greeks that the official ideology installed. I try to describe the Turkish youth terrible truths of our history, so that we can clear the fault of racist education in Turkey, as when he says that “A Turkish equivalent to the world” as the taught for more than 90 years of fascist-Kemalist ideology that denied the presence of any ethnic identity in Anatolia outside Turks. Do you know what Adolf Hitler said? “The first disciple of Kemal was Mussolini, and the second is me”; and also “The Ataturk has there been ten years, we can do it now.”

I think it will save the world is more awareness; more money, more weapons and more technology will not help any more than the great ideologies or great leaders, because the most rigorous law is not as strongly as consciousness. Consciousness can be established by empathy, and empathy begins with the recognition of the suffering of others. It behooves us to develop empathy with all other peoples of the world who are suffering and we stand with the oppressed, ignored, despised exploited and abused.

It is our responsibility to reach to feel the suffering of all human beings throughout the world regardless of their origin, language, belief, ideology, gender or sexual preference refusing any kind of discrimination.

No I do not just ask forgiveness for the genocide of Armenians, Assyrians, Nestorians, Chaldeans and Pontic Greeks but also for Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, Darfur, the Holocaust and other genocides all committed by insensitive human beings in our world, in the name of humanity, as a respectable human being with conscience.

I think “We shall overcome some day.”

Serkan Engin

Laze Turkish writer and poet

Gilbert Béguian translation Armenews